Millions of tropical sea creatures invade waters off B.C. coast

'We were kind of scared of them at first, afraid to touch them,' fishermen say

Vancouver Island-based fisherman Matt Stabler took this photo northwest of Nootka Sound in May. He said pyrosomes — pimply, tube-like animals — were so thick he and his crew had to move spots more than once to avoid them. (Matt Stabler)

Ash KellyDigital Producer

Ash Kelly is a digital producer who has reported from Prince Rupert, Prince George, Victoria , Vancouver and points between. You can find her and more stories on Twitter @AshDKelly.

Millions of non-native creatures known as pyrosomes are "blooming" off the coast of British Columbia and have the potential to devastate an already fragile food chain.

Scientists in Canada know very little about the pimply, translucent, tube-like animals — normally found in the tropics — some of which grow to 10 metres in length.

"There's pictures of people swimming up to these, riding on them as a diver, sticking their head in the opening," said Moira Galbraith, a zooplankton taxonomist at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, B.C.

The University of Victoria's Ocean Networks Canada encountered a large swarm of pyrosomes earlier this week.

Rapid reproductive ability

The mucous-covered animals turn from plump and juicy to flat and pancake-like when handled or left out of the water for more than a few hours.

For all their oddness, it's the sheer number of them that has both biologists and fishermen boggled.

A research team in central Oregon reported gathering an estimated 60,000 individual pyrosomes in around five minutes of trawling with a net.

"It's kind of crazy, it's a little bit over the top," said Galbraith, who has a theory that the creatures arrived after becoming stuck in anomalous warm water currents that occurred in the eastern Pacific between 2014 and 2016.